


With Fire and With His Sword

by azarias



Series: A future [1]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Identity Issues, M/M, Post-Canon, Vignette, post-murder hugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-02
Updated: 2017-05-02
Packaged: 2018-10-26 19:16:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10793049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azarias/pseuds/azarias
Summary: After the reunion, after the plantation, Captain Flint returns to the sea.He takes James and Thomas with him.





	With Fire and With His Sword

**Author's Note:**

> It's **a** future.
> 
> Thanks as always to Rahne for the beta.

They had the treasure.

It had cost — weeks, lives, bloody men crying for their mothers. Too many had known where the Skeleton Island was, in the end; James had known it wouldn't be as simple as sailing there on his stolen sloop and retracing his steps. And that treasure was cursed. No one who sought it failed to suffer. But they had it, now. 

They had it, and they would take it where it belonged. To Madi, who knew better than to trust the good will of the empires that had enslaved her people, that still saw them as wayward property, too much trouble to reclaim just now. To Madi, who was queen-in-waiting with eyes and ears throughout the West Indies. The war he had started with her was dead. But she had learned to wage war by other means, she said.

All it had taken was to haul Captain Flint back out of the abyss into which he had been cast. Put a pistol in his hand. Watch him go.

James sat on a hill overlooking the beach, where he could watch the bodies burn while he tried to justify the cost. Thomas had insisted on a funeral, a bare thing of a few words and a pyre. He'd taken the hale men and split them into details: one to gather wood, one to gather bodies, the rest to keep company with the dying and make food for the living. Everyone had been fed before the fire had started and the scent of roasting meat had filled the air.

Flint would have left the bodies where they lay.

Thomas sat down beside him and took the saber from his hands. It was past clean; it gleamed. Thomas wrapped it in the cleaning cloth and laid it carefully aside.

Too hot here with the sun still up to want another's body heat. Evening would bring a cooling breeze off the ocean, though the embers of the great fire would smoulder all night. Thomas put an arm around his back anyhow, and pulled at James until they were hip to hip, side against side, over-warm and sweating together, one double-bodied thing dressed in black and bloodstains.

James closed his eyes, and saw the afterimage of the pyre still burning there. Flesh already gone. Bones on their slow, sullen path to becoming ash.

Thomas turned his head, and his work-rough hand turned James's head so that Thomas could kiss him. On the mouth where the eucharist was given, on the forehead where palm ashes were drawn. Thomas thought like that, in terms like that. James had been having more and more Thomas-thoughts in the months since he had held Oglethorpe's throat in both his hands and offered the man a choice. Even as he had become Flint again, some part of James had fled to safety and tried becoming Thomas.

Oglethorpe had chosen poorly.

Thomas had come away from that prison with his faith in God intact, and his faith in man still there though it was fundamentally altered. James had never suffered either; it was strange that just now he felt their lack. 

"Twenty-three dead," Thomas said. He was close enough James could feel the words across his face. James's eyes were still closed. "Thirty prisoner, and we've given them their rum to keep them calm. All the ones who must die have. The rest will recover; some will need some time."

"The Maroons have physicians," James said. "Madi'll send them to the villages when we get back to her." He didn't know where the villages were, where the Maroons had gone. Madi's mother was no fool, either. She had well used the time the treaty had bought her. James had thought she would. He had sailed back to her island in the hope Madi had left a way for him to contact her.

She had.

Too dangerous to tell him where the Maroon villages had gone, when he'd set out on this mission to fetch her her war chest. Flint was not invulnerable. He had been thwarted, a score of times. Here on this island, half a year ago, he had been defeated. When he brought the treasure to her, he didn't know if she would tell him then. He didn't need to know. Vicious dogs were useful, but not welcomed in the home.

Thomas's hand caressed James's cheek, and it took so very little force to bring James's head against his broad shoulder, so that James's weight rested easily against him. "The bill wouldn't be as light, if not for you." 

There was a bandage tied 'round Thomas's forearm, where it had caught a glancing blow. It had been meant for Flint. Thomas had kicked the man's knee out, and then shot him in the back.

Thomas said, "You are brilliant. I've always known, but every time I see you in your element I'm struck by it anew. Brilliant and blazing." His hand squeezed James's shoulder, just where it met his neck. From there he must feel Flint's pulse beating languidly, the aftermath of battle flowing sated through his veins. "You were born to lead men. I'm sorry it took me so long to witness it firsthand."

James wrapped a hand around Thomas's wrist, but not to pull him away. He wasn't certain he _could_ make Thomas move. Thomas's will had always swayed him, not the other way. 

Thomas kissed him again, against his temple. The blood was near the surface there, too.

James opened his eyes and saw the pyre again. Burning. "This is what I do," he said, only loud enough that Thomas could hear. The waves on the beach drowned out any sound that tried to travel further. He couldn't hear the men carousing, nor the injured ones drinking their pain away. "This is how it will always be."

"No," Thomas said. It was a command, not a denial. "You do what's needed. We needed this today. Not always. There are thirty men out there I couldn't figure out how not to kill." Thomas's voice was calm. Controlled. You could barely hear the shaking in it. Many men shook after a battle. "You saved them, even while they fought you. One of them is just fourteen."

He turned his hand somehow, and now it was James's wrist he held. He drew it down to his lap and turned his hand again, and now their fingers laced together.

"What I need now is for you to rest." Thomas squeezed his hand, the slightest smile on his lips. "I don't have the first idea how to command a ship with more prisoners than crew. Or any ship at all."

They shouldn't spend another hour on this damned island. The dead didn't need them to stand watch over their fire. What the pyre didn't finish, birds would once it cooled, and the first storm that swept past here would wipe away any traces of fire or battle they had left. Nothing good happened on this fucking island. At sea, at least, they were mobile. 

But this crew wasn't made of pirates. He had enough sailors, just, to sail the sloop — two unlucky deaths on their side meant he'd have to rearrange the watch. The rest were Thomas's men, or Madi's. Men who fought for a cause or because their lives had been taken from them, or both. Runaway slaves of one color or another. They fought bravely and capably; not a one had shamed himself. But none of them were pirates, and taking them to sea in this mood, after a fight this ugly and with the rum already flowing, was not an idea he liked.

"We don't," Flint said, because this was one problem he could solve. "We take ours, and our wounded. Thirty's enough to man their boats, and we don't need to raid their stores. We take their guns." He made a gesture with his hand, tacking this way and that. "We sail away, and they go home."

Thomas sat quietly for a moment, and then asked, "Do we have to worry that they will talk?"

Eleven years ago, Thomas wouldn't have thought to ask. 

James shook his head. "They go home, and they tell their story. Say that they were attacked looking for Captain Flint's buried treasure. More drunken sailors, telling the same story — it's old by now. A few claim Captain Flint himself came after them."

The story was, there were no more pirates in Nassau, not in the West Indies entire. Only good king's men roamed these islands now, pardoned and prosperous. 

Captain Flint was dead. He'd killed Long John Silver, and Silver had killed him, fighting over the treasure, or a woman. Everyone knew that, it seemed. Let these men tell their story, and a month from now everyone would know Flint's _ghost_ guarded this island, a damned spirit twice as terrible as he had been in life.

"Your men don't know who we're taking it to. Her men — they won't talk. It doesn't matter what the survivors say."

It wouldn't make any difference to kill them.

Thomas looked sideways at him, then tilted his head and kissed him again. Nothing sacred about this kiss: it was earthy, and deep, and if James felt no hunger rise in his belly just now he would think about it later, and turn to Thomas in their shared bed. Bed, a hollow in the sand, it made no difference.

Violence had never spoiled his appetite for sex. He had thought, once, it would ruin Thomas's. He had been wrong, or else Thomas had changed.

James closed his eyes again, and Thomas held him tight.

"You're a good man, Lieutenant," Thomas said. It echoed in James's ears, the past and present colliding. Once James's own voice had shaken, standing up for a man who was worth any price. Thomas said, "Someone should be willing to defend you."

They were in full view of the beach. Every living man could see them sitting here, touching, nothing like brothers. James didn't care. If he pulled away from Thomas just now, he would split down the side, all his viscera spilling out onto the marram grass. Only Flint's skeleton would rise, clutching its saber and hourglass.

Pressed close to Thomas, counting their shared butcher's bill, he could remain whole. Let the bastards look.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a failed attempt at praise kink. It's okay h/c, I think. I have cramps and can't manage plot right now so I did this instead.


End file.
